{"id":5612,"date":"2011-03-21T00:06:52","date_gmt":"2011-03-21T00:06:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=5612"},"modified":"2011-03-21T12:30:35","modified_gmt":"2011-03-21T12:30:35","slug":"the-archbishop-and-the-governor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/the-archbishop-and-the-governor\/","title":{"rendered":"The Archbishop and the Governor"},"content":{"rendered":"

New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan is greatly relieved that the pesky matter<\/a> of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo\u2019s unCatholic (at least for now) lifestyle is finally behind us.\u00a0 The divorced Catholic governor has been very publicly living with his girlfriend and taking her to official events.\u00a0 An advisor to the Vatican\u2019s highest court, Edward Peters<\/a>,\u00a0had called for the denial of communion to Cuomo on the ground of his \u201cpublic concubinage\u201d\u2014a perfectly reasonable interpretation of Catholic doctrine.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The New York hierarchy, however, immediately closed ranks around Cuomo and brushed off this pesky Vatican busy-body.\u00a0 The leader of the Albany diocese, Bishop Howard Hubbard, assured Cuomo and the world that the Church fathers would not dream of judging Cuomo\u2019s domestic arrangements:<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are norms for all Catholics about receiving communion and we have to be sensitive pastorally to every person in their [sic] own particular situation,\u201d Bishop Hubbard said.\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bishop Hubbard\u2019s logic here is puzzling.\u00a0 The very existence of\u00a0 universal \u201cnorms for all Catholics\u201d means that they apply to \u201cevery person\u201d regardless of his \u201cown particular situation.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Not any more, it seems:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen it comes to judging worthiness for communion, . . . it\u2019s not something we comment on,\u201d said Hubbard.\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan was even more dismissive of the silly idea of stigmatizing Cuomo for his out-of-wedlock relationship.\u00a0 Cuomo had threatened to cancel a scheduled lunch with Dolan, possibly out of pique at the criticism of his \u201cconcubinage\u201d emanating from distant Catholic redoubts. But then Cuomo magnanimously found time in his busy schedule for lunch with the assorted New York priests.\u00a0 Dolan later reported that Cuomo\u2019s living arrangements never came up, adding:<\/p>\n

\u201cThank God it didn\u2019t, because it was a bit of a tempest in a teapot . . . . We were just happy to be there, and he obviously was, too.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lots of jolliness all around, obviously.\u00a0 Dolan joked that the best part of the fact that Cuomo rescheduled their meeting was that \u201cWe got lunch out of it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

(How the once fearsome power of the Church has shrunk!\u00a0 King Phillip in Verdi\u2019s Don Carlo complains that the \u201cthrone must always bow to the altar.\u201d\u00a0 Now the altar creeps up to the throne and is grateful for a few table scraps.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of the core purposes of the \u201csecular conservative\u201d construct, in my view, is to show that traditional morality can be justified on secular grounds alone.\u00a0\u00a0 Divine revelation is not needed to argue for obedience to the law and respect for the rights of others.\u00a0 More particularly, the married two-parent biological family can be shown to be superior to all other arrangements for raising children, based on evidence and on an understanding of the role of marriage in civilizing men and tying them to their children.\u00a0\u00a0 You don\u2019t need to worship a supernatural deity to grasp that the rise in illegitimacy and single-parent households is the greatest problem facing American society, mitigated only by the country\u2019s enormous affluence.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I suppose I should thank Archbishop Dolan for indirectly buttressing the argument behind secular conservatism.\u00a0 Not only is religious faith not required to justify traditional morality, religious leaders do not even have the backbone any more to stand up for traditional morality in the hard individual case, leavin\u2019 jes\u2019 us secular conservatives to stick our necks out.\u00a0 If, after centuries of accumulating scientific triumph in understanding the causal mechanisms of our world, we still must have relics, amulets, magical potions, and incantations, the one indisputable benefit that religion could provide would be fearlessness in stigmatizing anti-social behavior.\u00a0 Instead, we get an Archbishop who calls concern over a Catholic\u2019s carnal sin a \u201ctempest in a teapot\u201d and who thanks God for cooling down said \u201ctempest.\u201d\u00a0 To be sure, Cuomo has not fathered a child out of wedlock, but the depressing and sordid practice of Daddy imposing his \u201cgirlfriend\u201d and Mommy imposing her \u201cboyfriend\u201d on the children of divorce is intimately related to the catastrophic breakdown of the family.\u00a0 With apologies to my pro-life friends, I would argue that the epidemic of unwed fertility, divorce, and serial cohabitation is far more consequential to society than abortion.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Dolan has shown the Church to be a follower rather than a leader of morality.\u00a0 Today, no one gets booted out of the country club for divorcing his wife or for living with his girlfriend.\u00a0 So he’s darn well not going to be denied his communion wafer, either.\u00a0
\nAs religion accommodates itself to changing secular norms\u2014even discarding the notion of eternal punishment for the wrong belief or for no belief, a\u00a0 barbaric idea which a tolerant society can no longer stomach<\/a>\u2014I predict that the one irreducible religious idea will prove to be belief in an invisible Special Friend who can get us out of scrapes and misfortune by suspending the laws of nature on our behalf.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan is greatly relieved that the pesky matter of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo\u2019s unCatholic (at least for now) lifestyle is finally behind us.\u00a0 The divorced Catholic governor has been very publicly living with his girlfriend … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[182,728],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5612"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5612"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5616,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5612\/revisions\/5616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}